The Rats are Casing the Cats; E. A. Opitz

• I tern. There used to be honor even among thieves. The. pirates of ancient Greece, we are told by Sir Alfred Zimmern, thought little of murder and robbery, "but an unfair division [of the spoils] was the gravest of social offenses." There are modern crimes to match The Reverend Mr. Opitz is a member of the staff of the Foundation for Economic Educa tion. piracy, but let us focus on offenses outside the purview of the law and ask first how honor fares among us. The theater holds a mirror up to society, and a recent television show undoubtedly reflects a seg ment of the changing mores. It concerned college student cheating. The classroom cheat really harms himself, of course, although cheat ing may help him pass a given exam; socially, his actions violate the gentleman's code. When this code is observed generally in a school or a society, the cheat is on his own. He knows he does wrong, and he attempts to suppress, as best he can, his sense of guilt.

But when the code of the gentle man is not felt as personally bind ing, the sanction that replaces it is that "everybody's-doing-it." The television drama dealt with mass 21 22 THE FREEMAN February cheating in a college chemistry exam; the cheaters took pride in their cleverness, whereas the one student holdout felt guilty because he did the right thing. He refused to go along with the crowd and the crowd turned on him in self righteous scorn. Publicans thank ful that they are not like that Pharisee! • Item. Then there are turncoat words. "When I use a word," Humpty Dumpty said, "it means just what I choose it to mean neither more nor less." Take the word "LiberaI." A nineteenth cen tury L.iberal strove to free society by placing principled limitations on government. A twentieth cen tury Liberal, on the other hand, works to unfetter government from constitutional, legal, and moral restraints. A government of laws was the earlier ideal; now, a government of men. The accents of Milton and Locke, of Burke, Mill, Gladstone, and Morley were the authentic sounds of Liberal ism in the classical sense. The political words and music are to tally different today; but the label is the same.

• Item. Americans of the nine teenth century believed in the ideal of a society without priv ileged orders or classes, where government renders an evenhand ed justice to all men alike and maintains conditions of equal lib erty. Such was the American dream. Now, it goes without say ing that this ideal was frequently violated. Men have never lived up to their highest visions; but daily striving for unattainable goals puts the life of men on a plane higher than would be the case otherwise. Moreover, the defec tions from and violations of a principle do not, in and of them selves, constitute a case against the principle, nor provide adequate grounds for dropping it. The older principle has been dropped, how ever, and another has taken its place. Where did it come from? From the malpractices! Defections and violations are treated as raw data, and a hypothesis is drawn up to cover this data. The hypoth esis is then sold as the latest prin ciplefor social organization.

Government, in the theory of Liberalism which was in the as cendent during the nineteenth cen tury, protects individual rights by deterring or punishing acts of ag gression. Peaceful persons are free from governmental interven tions. But some men who live un der regimes erected on this theory will violate its principles. They will seek to turn a political instru' ment designed to secure liberty and justice for all into one which awards economic advantages to themsel ves at the expense of 1966 THE RATS ARE CHASING THE CATS! 23 others, in direct violation of classical theory. The twentieth century response to such wrongs has been to reduce the theory to the low level of the malpractice! Thinkers of our time have whipped up a new theory in which the dispensing of economic privi lege is the chief function of the political agency! This is today's "Liberalism" which has violations of person and property as a built in feature of its operation; it is designed to produce precisely what the previous theory was designed to deter! It refuses to function un less appeased by sacrificial vic tims, for there's no way to give politically distributed advantage to some without thereby taking advantage of others. This is a symptom of social disintegration.

• Ite'm. A given society exists be cause most men in it feel them selves bound individually by ties of loyalty to the things that so ciety stands for. In every society, however, there are to be found men in whom these ties are weak, able to be loosened still further by combinations of persuasion and cash. Treason is an ancient crime, and a serious one in the eyes of most men, including the traitors themselves. But treason has a new dimension and a new meaning in our time, writes Rebecca West: "Never before has treachery been so sunny and lighthearted, pre senting itself not as Judas, con scious of the last suspension from the elder tree, but as some inno cent little figure in straw hat and sailor suit." The advent of the atomic age has involved the scien tific community in politics, and worse, and Miss West describes the case of a well-known physicist. She observes that "the gaiety with ,vhich he faced the suspicion of treachery gives some indication of the curious mental climate in 'which he and his associates had their being." This is a climate in which the betrayers look down their noses at the parochial loyal ties of their fellow citizens, while smugly proclaiming their dedica tion to a police state system which is the most deeply rooted and far fl ung tyranny of all time. All, of course, in the name of Humanity and the Larger Good!

• Itern. Oddballs, kooks, and freaks regard themselves as nor mal and the rest of us as queer. Those who live by predation and parasitism think that only squares work. The Yahoos take over; the deviant becomes the norm. • Moral. Only when rodents and felines alike are hallucinated do rats chase cats. But let one rat catch one cat and the spell is broken; a caught cat means a d~d rn! • 17. From Ideology to Mythology II CLARENCE B. CARSON MANY AMERICANS have come un der the sway of a mythology which inclines them toward the promo tion and acceptance of social re form. This mythology is purveyed as history, consists of what many people think has happened. This history-as-mythology does contain distortions and exaggerations, but it must be kept in mind that it is not a mythology simply because of these.,Nor is it rescued from myth ology by the number of facts which can be summoned to give it the ap pearance of validity; these are but grist to its mills. It is a mythology because it stems from a mental construct instead of reality, be cause it embodies ideologies.